Playing Catch Up

I took the day off (for the most part) from blogifying yesterday. Even though I worked fewer hours this week, I was even more tired by the end of it. Some (confidential for now, sorry) stuff came up that complicated things, but I think it was mostly Morpheus playing catching up with me. 

Continuing on that theme…

In case you didn’t already know, there’s a special drawing for Vintage Club members this weekend for 80 pieces of the Special Run Balking Mule Lucy, in Gloss. I don’t know if this represents the portion of the run that wasn’t officially ordered by club members, or just a random number they pulled out of the air. Been putting my entries in, regardless, because ooh, shiny.

The BreyerFest survey forms have also been sent out, via e-mail. I always laugh about "confidentiality" part; I have a fairly distinctive writing voice, so I assume they know it’s me, anyway, and write with that assumption in mind.

There’s a small, blurry, Facebook-derived picture floating around of an alleged new Breyer mold coming out soon, a portrait of Harley D Zip. I didn’t find out about it until the Blab forum topic had reached well over a hundred posts, running the gamut from "OMG I LUV IT!" to "Meh". I think I’ll wait until I see a larger and more official picture before I give it the thumbs up or down. 

I also found a bunch of neat stuff at the flea market last weekend that I never got around to talking about. There were a couple of decent bodies, a Lomonosov Polar Bear Cub, a Limited Edition Royal Doulton Bunnykins figurine, and a book about Draft Horses illustrated by Francis Eustis (going straight to the reference library). The "biggest" finds were a pair of Mastercrafters clocks - one of those mysterious "Quarter Horse Yearling" clocks, and a Swinger with an Onyx case:

I can’t recall if I’ve mentioned it here or not before, but we’re still unsure of the relationship between the QH Yearling and the goldtoned clock above. The clock clearly predates the Yearling: this example has a postal zone, rather than a zip code in the company address listed on the back. Zones were phased out in the 1960s, but the Quarter Horse Yearling didn’t officially debut until 1970.

Breyer’s relationship with Mastercrafters lasted well beyond the Western Horse/Davy Crockett era, but for how long, and in what capacities, we are not sure.

The Yearling clock is an upgrade, but the Swinger is technically "new" for me - I have had several in the Brown Burl case, but none in the Green Onyx before. In my excitement, I didn’t examine the clock as closely as I should have when I negotiated for it: it is still partially disassembled because it required extensive cleaning.

This is a polite way of saying that it was possibly one of the grossest things I have ever bought at the flea market. (Not The Grossest Thing Ever. You really don’t need to know about that. All I can say is that it wasn’t a horse.)

When I got it home and took it out of the bag, I initially thought that the previous owner had lined the bottom of it with felt.

It was not felt.

It was an encrusted layer of dust, dirt, cigarette smoke, and cat hair. Upon closer examination, it looked like something you’d see getting shoveled out of a window on the TV show Hoarders. The saddest part is that I found an address label under the crud indicating that the previous owner had purchased it, reconditioned, from a clock shop not even ten years ago.

Most of the gross is gone, but it still needs more cleaning and repair work. It’s been an interesting restoration challenge, if nothing else.

(Ooh, freaky. I just noticed that they are stopped at exactly the same time, even though I bought them from two different vendors!)